VacationSelector

Melbourne or Mexico City?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Melbourne
60
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Mexico City
62
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

MelbourneMexico City
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 55 points.55
MelbourneMexico City
Score550
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km194
Coast distance4 km247 km
Water distance4 km—
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 9 points.9
MelbourneMexico City
Score7566
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,8882,179
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2915
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 30 points.30
MelbourneMexico City
Score4979
Museums within 10 km42138
Museums within 2 km of centre2465
Share of museums within 2 km %5747
Unesco sites within 50 km16
Nightlife. Mexico City leads by 4 points.4
MelbourneMexico City
Score7478
Drinking venues within 4 km1,9212,156
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,200926
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6243
Nightclubs within 4 km124198
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 20 points.20
MelbourneMexico City
Score4363
Protected land share 50 km %630
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %81100
Park area within 2 km166 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 10 points.10
MelbourneMexico City
Score6050
Tourist attractions within 2 km2623
Park area within 2 km166 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km14
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 3 points.3
MelbourneMexico City
Score5754
Notable places within 2 km10388
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Mexico City leads by 26 points.26
MelbourneMexico City
Score5076
Price level global90.254.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 14 points.14
MelbourneMexico City
Score7690
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C22.2 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm3 mm to 186 mm
Dry months06
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Mexico City
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
Mexico City
8
8
9
8
8
6
6
6
5
6
7
7

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre). Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneMexico City
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
3 h 35 m
€248-282
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
17 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 25 m
€203-306
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
14 h 0 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
17 h 30 m
€1,075-1211
2 stops
MEX · 7 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
SantiagoSCL
13 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
15 h 20 m
€1,089-1205
3 stops
MEX · 7 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-09 to 2026-09, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureMelbourneMexico City
Official languageEnglishSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC-6
Emergency number000911
Elevation31 m2,240 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneMexico City
City population5,350,7059,209,944
People per km²5356,202
Museums within 10 km42108
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km16
Distinct cuisines in the centre8650
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Melbourne or Mexico City somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.